Digital Twins Give Hydrogen a Greener Path to Growth

This article is a part of our unique IEEE Journal Watch sequence in partnership with IEEE Xplore.

Hydrogen has nice promise as a low-emission gas supply. It burns clear, producing solely water as a by-product, and when it’s produced by electrolysis by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, your complete life cycle may be very environmentally pleasant.

But using hydrogen has by no means reached its potential as a renewable gas, largely as a result of its manufacturing course of drives up the fee. Most hydrogen at present remains to be produced as a by-product of fossil-fuel refinement—utilizing methane with carbon monoxide as a by-product. Meanwhile, the hydrogen produced by electrolysis represents lower than 1 % of all of the world’s hydrogen manufacturing. In order for hydrogen to be a viable supply of unpolluted vitality, the price of electrolysis must be a lot decrease.

Sharaf Alsharif, a researcher on the Oldenburger OFFIS Institute for Information Technology in Oldenburg, Germany, believes digital twins might assist deliver down the price of clear hydrogen manufacturing. Digital twins are computer-simulation applications that may monitor and modify the operations of a bodily machine in nice element. The shut monitoring of hydrogen electrolyzers that digital twins present might assist streamline the gadgets’ operation and convey down the price of electrolysis in consequence.

“Right now, we can’t think of all the use cases that make an electrolyzer efficient. But that’s the point—that you can…make it possible with this digital twin.”

—Sharaf Alsharif, Oldenburger OFFIS Institute for Information Technology, Oldenburg, Germany

One method digital twins might scale back the price of electrolysis is by monitoring the state of well being of electrolyzers. Digital twins can monitor the operations of electrolyzer parts like electrodes, membranes, or pumps to see which components could also be more likely to fail and to proactively make suggestions for scheduling upkeep. Alsharif says such prediction upkeep capabilities might save operators many hours of manufacturing time when electrolyzers would in any other case be taken offline to allow unscheduled troubleshooting.

To encourage the adoption of digital twins for electrolysis, Alsharif and his colleagues at OFFIS offered a software program structure—a sort of architectural blueprint for constructing software program techniques—for growing hydrogen electrolysis monitoring digital twins on the ETG Congress 2023 convention in Germany.

The researchers envisioned a future the place hydrogen electrolysis operators would have dashboards that monitor the efficiency of electrolyzers working within the discipline. Digital twins would offer the dashboard information by remotely monitoring electrolyzers and issuing alerts when anomalous habits is detected. And having a well-defined software program structure, Alsharif says, might assist operators extra simply construct digital twins for his or her hydrogen electrolysis techniques.

Digital twins also can assist operators by having direct management over electrolyzers, Alsharif says. One helpful software of direct management is adjusting electrolyzers’ vitality consumption based mostly on the energy grid’s present vitality combine. When extra renewable sources of vitality are a part of the combination, digital twins can direct electrolyzers to ramp up manufacturing, due to this fact making the manufacturing of hydrogen extra inexperienced total. Production will also be decreased throughout utilization peaks when the value of vitality from the grid rises, which might decrease the price of hydrogen electrolysis manufacturing total.

Researchers saved these use instances in thoughts whereas they created a digital twin software program structure appropriate with any kind of hydrogen electrolyzer, Alsharif says. The structure needed to deal with necessities like bidirectional information connections with electrolyzers, stay updates on the well being of electrolyzer parts, and maintenance-schedule suggestions.

They settled on a service-oriented structure for constructing digital twins for hydrogen electrolysis. A service-oriented structure consists of a central software program program that accepts requests from different smaller applications and “orchestrates” requests between all of the parts. The design received over different architectural types due to its flexibility. New capabilities may be added to the digital twin simply within the type of new providers that merely plug into the central program.

“Right now, we can’t think of all the use cases that make an electrolyzer efficient,” Alsharif says. “But that’s the point—that you can actually apply any service and make it possible with this digital twin.”

Service-oriented architectures are additionally quick sufficient to assist the stay bidirectional information connection wanted by electrolyzers. That’s in contrast to a microservice structure, for instance, which causes delays attributable to the next quantity of requests despatched between providers, Alsharif says. Operators who need to use digital twins to observe electrolyzers can comply with this architectural blueprint when constructing the software program for his or her digital twins.

Future analysis, he says, may embody utilizing digital twins to assist with the manufacturing technique of electrolyzers. To actually scale up clear hydrogen manufacturing, the manufacturing of enormous electrolyzers, which is at present a semi-manual course of, must scale up as nicely, Alsharif says.

“That’s where the digital twins technology comes into play—by supporting this whole process, not only the operation and maintenance of the electrolyzers, but also from the very beginning of the production or the manufacturing process,” he says.